On Christianity, Fundamentalism, Spanking, And What Constitutes Child Abuse
children. They likely come to view the ritual as a pain filled affair necessary to gain the parent’s love. They must surely long for a love that might, someday, be unconditional, with no beatings attached. They plead for God to deliver them. God doesn’t. As much anecdotal evidence indicates, as adults, such children do not thank God that they had a parent willing to inflict physical punishment on them and many grow up with a very confused image of God. They have been taught that God is all-powerful, yet God did not rescue them when they pleaded with God for mercy.
An interesting view of all of this emerges from BIOLA University’s Rosemead School of Psychology. The study in question is reported in BIOLA’s Journal of Psychology and Theology. It is important to remember that we have not at this point answered the question of whether spanking is abusive in any substantive sense. The BIOLA article, Religiosity and the Risk of Perpetrating Child Physical Abuse: An Empirical Investigation (2005), authored by Dyslyn and Thomsen agrees that Conservative Protestants (the denominational listing in the article lists denominations usually considered evangelical/fundamentalist) are more likely to engage in corporal punishment. However, the authors do not see spanking as abusive. Their study, while finding Conservative Protestants to have the highest score on a test of likely abusive behavior, states that the differences between the Conservatives, Mainline Protestants, Catholics, and unaffiliated are not statistically significant.
One might argue that there is some practical significance in Conservatives obtaining the highest score, but that would be shaky ground. Methodologically, there are problems in that the test used is attitudinal and was given mainly to college students without children. Also, the college environment from which the sample was taken is not described, so it is hard to generalize. In addition, the study flies in the face of considerable anecdotal evidence. Most importantly, BIOLA stands for the Bible Institute of Los Angeles. One might suspect some researcher bias.
So, we come full circle. Everyone seems to agree that fundamentalists, or those leaning that direction, are more likely than most to resort to corporal punishment. Further, the lion’s share of child developmentalists see spanking as a harmful thing-associated with undesirable child, adolescent, and adult outcomes (Ellison, 2001). The question then is, When is the line crossed? Is all spanking abusive? When I was part of the fundamentalist world, what I knew about and saw were some pretty stout spankings administered to children as young as six months old. I saw lots of spankings with paddles. [Remember, you were encouraged to use a “neutral(?)” object. The hands were used to give love. The notion was that the child would not associate the object with the parent.] In answering the question about spanking, and abuse, I turn now to a fascinating study from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The study, reported on the Medpage Today website (Heavy Spanking Predicts Overt Child Abuse, 2008), revealed the following results:
1. Parents who spanked were 2.7 times more likely to engage in overt abusive behavior than non-spankers.
2. Parents that spanked with a belt or paddle or another object as opposed to their hands had triple the odds of becoming abusers (remember the “neutral” object theory?).
3. For each additional spanking per year, there was a 3% increase in the likelihood of yet stronger punishments being used in the home. (When I was in the fundamentalist church, it was not unusual for children to receive two or three spankings a day.)
4. The report stated, “This is the first study to demonstrate that parents who report spanking children with an object and who frequently spank children are much more likely to report harsh punishment acts consistent with physical abuse.
All of these conclusions seem to have implications for children placed in a fundamentalist Christian environment. Associated Content, in a May 2007 posting, The Effects of the “No Spanking Law” on Child Abuse in Sweden, discusses a law passed in Sweden in the 1970’s that made spanking a civil offence. Before the law, the family violence child death rate in 1970 was 18%. In recent years it has been 0%. By 1981, only 26% of Swedish parents supported spanking. Now it is less than 11%. In 1996, there were 57 reported cases of child abuse per 100,000 people. At the same time in the US that figure stood at 4,500/100,000.
Clearly, spanking and child abuse are connected. It also seems clear that in their propensity to support corporal punishment, fundamentalism and fundamentalist environments could likely put children at risk for abuse. It is something concerned parents would do well to bear in mind. They must ask: Is it a risk